Is This Sparkling Tea the New La Croix?

It started with an Instagram. As with most things pink, bubbly, and beautifully packaged, my bottle of rose sparkling tea was earning many heart-eye emojis, with accompanying messages like “OMG where do I get this?!” and “um that sounds amazing.” Perhaps they felt a magnetic pull toward that particular hue of Millennial Pink; or maybe they noticed that the tea was infused with lime and cardamom, words that’d make most flavor nerds’ ears perk up. Either way, by the end of my Instagram story’s 24-hour run, I had around 15 DMs from followers asking me how to get their hands on a bottle of SOUND tea.

We live in a world that loves mash-ups (the Cronut, Doritos Locos Tacos, this Game of Thrones/Harry Potter quiz from BuzzFeed—you get the picture), so combining unsweetened organic teas with sparkling water is a stroke of genius. Actually, two geniuses. SOUND was dreamed up by two nuclear power engineers, Tommy Kelly and Salim Najjar, who weren’t pumped about the non-alcoholic, unsweetened beverages that were on the market. “We drank things like tea and sparkling water, but we were getting really sick of the same thing,” Kelly says. “We found that most unsweetened teas were really watered down and sparkling waters were just flavored water. We wanted something like a soda—a refreshing drink with bubbles and caffeine—but without the sugar. So, I started carbonating chilled tea in my SodaStream.”

Kelly began sharing his bubbly drink with Najjar, and one day, there was an ah-ha moment: “There was a void in the market. We felt like the healthier drinks we were seeing weren’t exciting. So we came up with our mission: To make products with sound ingredients, which is where our name comes from.” They began using suppliers with vigorous sourcing standards to find excellent organic teas from around the world. They hired a consultant to help develop compelling flavor combinations. Instead of brewing tea and putting it through a household SodaStream, they made tea concentrate and shipped it to a bottling facility, where sparkling water would be added.

And they gave the bottle a polished, totally Instagram-catnip design.

But also: it tastes really good! The sparkling rose tea is clean, bright, and refreshing, with a subtly spicy and aromatic hit from the cardamom. Other flavors, like the yerba mate and white tea, are more tea-forward. Helpfully, the bottles indicate whether you’re getting “no caffeine,” “some caffeine,” or “lots of caffeine,” with exact milligrams listed if you really need to know.

SOUND is available at grocery stores in the Northeast like Whole Foods, Fairway, and, soon, Dean and Deluca. They plan to expand their distribution to the Mid-Atlantic area next month, and to the West Coat next year. Currently, you can order SOUND on Amazon, Jet, and SOUND’s site—I recommend getting a mixed case to try every flavor. It’s perfect for those days when you just don’t feel like drinking alcohol: I brought a couple bottles to a picnic, and nobody poked at my decision to forgo the rosé as I sipped bubbly rose tea from a plastic wine glass.

As for Kelly and Najjar’s favorites? Yerba mate and, of course, rose. “I’m Lebanese,” explains Najjar, “Every time I sip the rose tea, it reminds me of my grandmother, who made a drink with rosewater syrup and cardamom.” Sweet.